In the latest edition of Psychiatric Services, a senior staff attorney for the Center for Public Representation, Newton, Massachusetts points to a connection between eugenics laws of the 1920’s and our current abortion law.
In reviewing a book by Paul Lombardo about the sterilization of Carrie Buck and the now infamous Supreme Court decision of Buck v. Bell where Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes upheld the sterilization of Carrie Buck and others like her with the infamous sentence, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
The ruling was the codification of eugenics in America and led to the sterilization of hundreds of thousands of poor and disabled women.
She said eventually many states passed legislation protecting people with disabilities from sterilization. But then Roe came along.
But Roe v. Wade was used to overturn protective state legislation banning sterilization of people with mental retardation and enabling guardians to impose sterilization on their wards. Thus each case has been used to support sterilization of people with mental disabilities. Our continuing social ambivalence about these issues makes Lombardo’s book starkly relevant today, when women are using the rights they gained under Roe v. Wade to abort fetuses found to have Down’s syndrome and the Supreme Court protects hospitals that follow parents’ direction to provide only palliative care to infants born disabled when those infants could have been treated and lived (3). Is it hypocritical to criticize the statement that “three generations of imbeciles are enough” when individuals today decide that even one generation is too many?
So anyone who tries to say that abortion laws and eugenics don’t coincide neatly, are just not facing the facts.
Roe, in many ways, is the continuation of Buck v. Bell – which is almost unanimously seen as one of the most tragic decisions of the Supreme Court. We should pray that one day this country can look back on Roe the same way.
June 7, 2009 at 6:27 pm
Well, of course you don't see 'pro-choicers' forcing anything. Abortions are not generally performed in public. Thus we do not see the abortionist forcing his or her will on the fetus, ripping his or her limbs off, crushing his or her head, etc.
In some countries , China being the prime example, those pushing abortion have no such scruples about the woman's willingness. Thus one finds women with an ' illegal pregnancy' being forcibly aborted in the ninth month .
June 8, 2009 at 5:57 am
Narwen,
Just in fairness to the Chinese (not to 'China,' or its government), and because it's a happy story; I had a Chinese grad-student roomate once, who told me of a neighbor who had 'twins' — a daughter who was 4 by the time her brother was born, but only got a birth certificate when he came along. This obviously had to be accomplished with the collusion of the neighborhood, and probably one or two local officials. The law is written on our hearts, and sometimes we actually read a little…
But you're exactly right on the nature of the real problem.
S. Murphy